


12 Monkeys Theme Week - Day 4 - No Rest

by pirategirljack



Category: 12 Monkeys (TV)
Genre: F/M, Fluff and Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-23
Updated: 2015-04-23
Packaged: 2018-03-25 11:01:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3807910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pirategirljack/pseuds/pirategirljack
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cole and Cassie have stuff to do before the S1 finale showdown.</p>
            </blockquote>





	12 Monkeys Theme Week - Day 4 - No Rest

They both had nightmares after that night. Cassie dreamed of betrayal and death and not being able to know who she could trust. Of a thousand black-clad arms with pale hands grabbing at her. Their touch was always cold, and she always woke up chilled to the bone and shaking. Usually, she woke because she’d called out and woke herself up–or because Cole woke her. His hands were always warm. Even after the paradox cure reset his DNA, effectively washing the serum from his body, he ran warm, with a high metabolism and a radiating heat filling the spaces between them. Spaces that got smaller the longer they lived out of the back of her SUV or the small, dingy motel rooms they rotated through.

On the worst nights, Cole held her and helped her stay awake, then helped her relax so she could sleep again, smoothing his rough hands over hers until she unfisted her fingers and laid back down under the blankets.

Neither of them commented on how the second bed never got used. It was too far away, no matter how small the room.

Cole’s nightmares were about being consumed by light that left nothing of himself behind, or about being overrun by violent men with knives and guns and dead eyes that wanted to kill him or make him like them. The first night, he woke with his gun in his hand, and terrified himself with the realization that he was about to point it at Cassie, that he’d mistaken her closeness for part of the attack he’d dreamed of.

She’d still been asleep, but he dropped his gun and scrubbed his hands over his face anyway, breathing too hard, teetering on the edge of some trembling sort of madness he feared more than anything else. Anything but losing Cassie without the ability to go back and fix it.

But usually, it was Cassie who woke him, her hand on his chest, her eyes big and worried. She’d looked the same when he was dying, before the cure; he’d hoped being healthy again would make that look go away. She always woke him carefully, quietly, much gentler than when he woke himself from the nightmares. Then she’d smooth his hair back, and murmur nothings to him until his breathing slowed, his heartbeat stuttered down to a normal speed. He couldn’t trust that they were safe now. He couldn’t let that guard down and risk letting Cassie get hurt.

They had nightmares, but they had each other, too, and as long as that was true, they could do anything.

They stayed off the grid for eight weeks before they were forced to settle. It was the coldest winter either of them had seen in years, and they compared notes about the quality of the cold, the way it knifed through you when you least expected it. It was better than talking about everything they’d lost.

Some nights, they slept snuggled together under their coats and Cole’s blanket in the back of the SUV like the first night, right after the paradox cure. Some nights, they slept out in the open in the woods, where Cole was teaching her everything he knew about living in the wild, off the grid. Those were the worst nights, and after each of them, Cassie insisted on staying in a tiny motel somewhere nondescript for a few days afterward. Never more than three days. Never more than an hour’s drive from the CDC so she could still go to work and make the income they were now using up just staying hidden. She acted like nothing had happened around them, at work, but Cole saw how thin she was getting.

So Cassie went to work, and burned up her vacation days and Jules’s conviction that she’d successfully weathered her breakdown when she couldn’t.

When she went, Cole stayed in the room with a gun close at hand and a stack of notebooks, recreating all their lost files, trying to make connections. When she found something new, she brought it home to him.

Every day she went, she felt like something terrible would happen while she was relatively safe at work, and every day she came home, the relief made her wrap herself up in his arms. It was like she couldn’t properly breathe until she was home. He was her home now.

Jones had said he was of 2015 now. He believes that. But Cassie had spent two years watching him go and waiting for him to return, and she never quite believed he wouldn’t poof out of existence when she didn’t have eyes on him.  
Both of them grew thin and tired. But they also grew closer and warmer. She caught herself watching his hands as he scratched in a notepad with a sharpie, or shuffled through pages with the pen sticking out of his mouth. She caught him watching her pace around one small room or another, trying to make their random-seeming bits of info match up.

In those moments, they always smiled, and the winter seemed less cold.

They had a plan. There was no way to communicate with Jones in the future–no way for them to be warned–but they could leave information she could use then, information she could give to Cole before he left. Or whoever came after Cole, now that he was just another test subject lost in time, as far as anyone but Jones knew.

Everything they found, every single scrap, they copied twice. One for their own files, and one for the Jones File–actually, a series of files. They hid them in places that Cole knew would survive relatively unscathed–a safety deposit box in a certain bank, the basement of an abandoned farmhouse that Cole and Ramse will-did stay in one night, a cement pit that they could close off and that would remain closed for thirty years. Cassie marked all the locations on a map–also in duplicate–one for them and one for her. Cassie barely knew her, and only this younger version that was her contemporary; Cole knew her as a friend, as something approaching a mother–if your mother used you as a willing pawn and a test subject, and made deeply problematic moral decisions about you life but still cared about you.

Sometimes Cole talked about his life growing up. There were a lot of stories of raids and attacks; a few stories of pranks and embarrassing moments. He tried not to say Ramse’s name, but their lives had always been a joined life.  
In return, she told him about her life. She considered it so typical as to be boring–she’s always craved something more exciting–but Cole wanted all the details. The world was still new to him. Everything was something he’d never seen before.

The day they planted the last file cache, they decided it was time to find a new place to live. Her credit cards couldn’t take much more, and Cole had no way to help that, since officially, he was either five years old or didn’t exist, depending on how you looked at it. And they were exhausted from moving, always moving.

They still had work to do, and they needed a safe home base to do it from.

**Author's Note:**

> Originally part of 12 Monkeys Theme Week -   
> http://samiholloway.tumblr.com/post/115936874597/12-monkeys-theme-week-day-4-casserole
> 
> This one bears directly on my After the End fic (and therefore probably also Before the End), and will eventually be expanded into a whole story of its own.


End file.
